The Young Chefs Program was developed at Carleton College (Northfield, MN) in 2011 by a student organization.  The program uses cooking to provide science instruction and mentoring to underserved students in the local schools, and is staffed and run by Carleton students, with support from the College's Center for Community and Civic Engagement.  After the first year of running the program, a group of Carleton students and two faculty members worked together through an independent study course to develop publishable lesson plans for use in the program.  Over two years, the students developed approximately 20 detailed lessons that emphasized cooking skills, scientific concepts, and the creation of healthy foods.  In addition, the lesson plans were aligned with national and state educational standards, to facilitate their future adoption by teachers.  While it was largely student-led, the two faculty members involved in this project, a chemist and a STEM-education specialist, collaborated with the students to develop the overall vision of the project as well as to conceive of the lesson plan ideas and to review the content prior to publication online.  This project provided an opportunity for students to channel their deep interests in food, cooking, and working with underserved children to develop a rigorous set of curriculum materials with a specific goal in mind.  Because of the collaboration with an existing student-run program that was operating in the community, students in the independent study had a ready-made network of testers from whom to get immediate feedback on how their lessons worked for the middle-school student audience.  In addition to providing exciting opportunities for the middle-school students to learn, this opportunity provided the Carleton students who wrote the curriculum with a structured, community-engaged opportunity to learn and explore their interests in the science of cooking.  This presentation will describe the goals and accomplishments of the student curriculum development team, and situate their work in the context of civic engagement work happening at Carleton College.

Young Chefs Program lesson plan development: A student-led independent study project in cooking and science

256th National Meeting (2018)

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